“Lithuania is currently embroiled in a bizarre and deeply confusing political controversy,” writes Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald, “which reveals what happens when a country becomes gripped by extremist ideologies.” He’s taking a sarcastic swipe at last week’s allegations that the Central Intelligence Agency built and operated one of its secret prisons on the outskirts of Vilnius. Greenwald’s piece isn’t high wit, but it makes for an apt exercise in contrasts: between perceived secularisms and fundamentalisms, and between the Obama promise of change and its subsequent maturation as it’s been confronted with the demands of realpolitik.
I especially liked the double-entendre reminder of former SecDef Donald Rumsfeld’s curiously mutilated view of the lessons of history.
MICHAEL A. INNES 